Aishiteru Means I Love You
by KnightOfNevermore
Summary: Leon and Claire find themselves in a deathmatch Scrabble game where she dominates and he tries to rack up points, while secretly enjoying Claire's victory dances. However, when Leon makes a daring move, will this game prove them more than just friends?


**A/N:** Hey guys, here's another story, this time around it's some good ol' Cleon. I was replaying Darkside Chronicles and I watched that stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid scene of Ada and Leon and became passionately driven to post a Cleon piece. So I searched around my computer and found this; it's an old one, I just fixed it up a bit and polished the edges. I hope you enjoy it!

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"That's so not a word!"

It was a quiet afternoon in the beautiful city of Washington D.C.; excluding the rather heated game of Scrabble taking place in a high end apartment in Columbia Heights, a short drive across 14th Street Northwest to the White House; perfect for it's owner. Two people were hunched over the brand new edition of Scrabble, the board was all ready covered with words ranging from MUERETE, Spanish for die to MONASTERIENSE Latin for monster (Their vocabulary was filled with enough creepy words and adjectives to make H.P. Lovecraft do a back-flip). The multitude of words covered the various languages that fell within the pair's knowledge; the rulebook had long ago been discarded, when the competition decided to become more creative with the extent of the words in their knowledge.

"Excuse me Mr. Police-Academy-Graduate, I'm the one with the bachelors in English!" Claire sneered, smirking at Leon as she tallied up her already enormous score.

"How the hell did you manage that? You, Claire Redfield, in school?" Leon chuckled, attempting to picture his friend studying diligently.

"Shut it, Kennedy. And I will prove to you that ubiquitous is a word!" With that, the fiery red head abruptly sat up, jogging the table a bit (leaving scratch marks on the fine wooden floors that Leon would later mourn) and strode over to the bar in kitchen, her companion's eyes never leaving her. She swept up a much dog-eared book from the granite counter and leafed through it, her auburn ponytail bouncing with every tap of her combat boots. She pulled her lower lip with her canine tooth, a habit she had picked up from Rebecca, which she had developed during the Umbrella campaign due to nerves. Leon watched her expression, his eyes flicking back and forth across the tarnished indexes of the dictionary, secretly wishing it was his teeth on her lip, not her own. This thought resulted in him blushing furiously, growling inwardly at his thoughts and taking a good long swig from his beer mug that rested on the coffee table in front of him. Her sapphire eyes lit up, sparkling with glee as her eyes feasted upon the definition that she desired. She cackled menacingly and danced over to an amused Leon who unbeknownst to her was enjoying her how into the game she was, finding her desire to win extremely cute.

"Ha! I told you!" She shoved the worn Oxford Dictionary in his face, causing him to lurch backward and raise an eyebrow at her, "See: 'Ubiquitous: adjective; meaning present, appearing, or found everywhere:_ his ubiquitous influence was felt by all the family' _21 points for me!"

She grinned as she snapped the book close and strutted back to her seat on the leather couch, plopping down on it with a satisfied thud. She delicately laid out her six chips: U, B, I, O, U, S, on to Leon's QUIT which he built off of her MONASTERIENSE. She snatched a pad of paper of Leon's coffee table and scribbled down her score of 21 points teasingly, drawing out each number with perfection to show Leon was the boss when it came to Scrabble.

She finished with a flourish and smile a sweet condescending smile, and said, with patronizing 'you can do it' mocking voice, "Your turn."

He only returned the gesture when he effortlessly tossed down RADIOGRAPH, building off of Claire's O in MONASTERIENSE earning him 21 points; making his measly 22 points jump to 43, 1 point away from Claire's total of 44.

She growled and shifted out of her victory position and into attack mode, and a shiver of trepidation rolled down Leon's spine when a large winding smile curled across her rosy lips as she stared at the word Leon had just placed down on the board. Then, with taunting grace and arrogance she placed seven letters on the board, forming XERORADIOGRAPHY; worth 32 points. Claire once again returned to power, her score now 33 points higher than Leon's.

And so the hunted became the hunter.

As she collected her new letters from the black Scrabble bag Leon cradled his head, cursing her annoyingly large vocabulary. Inwardly he smiled at her elation, to think she had gone through hell and back, not once, not twice, but three times and still was able to smile as if her life had not been riddled with fear and sorrow. That is why he loved her. Not that she knew, oblivious was one of the many traits Claire and Chris shared, whether this was to his advantage Leon mused upon, eyes never leaving the gloating Claire.

"Hello? Leon? You alive in there?" Claire chuckled and Leon flushed.

Great, her obliviousness was rubbing off on him. The irony.

"Your turn, that is, if you still think you can stand a chance," Claire taunted, her voice once again patronizing and triumphant.

"An Ace always has an Ace up his sleeve," Leon replied, earning a snort from Claire and remark on his horrible one-liners. Leon then emphasized his every movement as he carefully plucked eight alphabet chips from his plastic stand, ("Nine instead of seven," she had stated as he fished around in the bag for letter pieces," One chip for every year that I've known you."), and laid them upon the Scrabble board as if they were made of glass.

It was Claire's turn to stare at Leon confused: "Aishiteru? What the hell does that mean?" Claire asked, wrinkling her nose, displaying her disgust at the unknown word before her.

All Leon did was jerk his head toward his laptop, which lay on the coffee table under their small collection of empty beer bottles, earning a raised eyebrow from Claire. Without further comment she cleared the bottles off the machine and pulled it open. She then started her search for the meaning of the offending word. Finding an online translator she selected 'Detect Language,' glanced at the board one last time for the spelling and input the word. She discovered the language to be Japanese, and the meaning to be…

Claire flushed bright red; Leon grinned: mission accomplished. Claire cleared her throat, the pink stain of her cheeks spreading across her face. She scanned the page once again, her blush deepening.

**Translate Text, Webpages and Documents**

**Enter text or a webpage URL, or upload a document.**

**Translate From: Detect Language**

**To: English**

_**Aishiteru**_

**Translate To: English**

**From: Detect Language- Japanese**

_**I love you**_

With a thud Claire quickly shut the laptop and dropped it hurriedly on to the table. She grabbed the score pad and glanced at the board, attempting to calculate his score to distract her self from her roaming thoughts.

Leon smirked, amused by her attempt to act normal and let the meaning of the word roll off her back.

"It's 12 points, giving you," Claire's eyebrow twitched as Leon chuckled, "55 points, while I have 75 points. I'm still winning."

With that she dove her hand into the Scrabble Sack, grasping five pieces and placing them on her small plastic stand that came with the game. As she scrutinized her letters Leon sat back and enjoyed the view, her blush still remained on her face, much to Leon's pleasure. Finally her eyes widened and a small smile crept up across her face, like ivy winding up a wall, it spread and widened, till a full-blown grin was plastered on her cherry-glossed lips.

Claire scooped up only two pieces from her set of nine, holding her hand in front of them, blocking their identity from Leon's view. She then placed them on the board, two chips aligned next to the vertical Aishiteru, built off of the T. Claire finally removed her hand and sat back, it was her turn to enjoy the view as Leon flushed, the simple word of TOO causing him so much chagrin and exultation.

_I love you._

_I love you, too._

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**A/N2: **Agh, I hate scrabble. This piece overall was a pain in the ass. Yeah, I know that I completely disregarded the rules of Scrabble, but do ya think that Leon and Claire would actually adhere to them? I used Aishiteru as his 'I love you' phrase because it's the only word that I could find, in any language, that was 'I love you' in one word. Let's just say he watches some random Japanese game show or something. XD. Well whatever, I'm just glad it's over with. Reviews are greatly appreciated and they truly make my day. So please review, it'll help me get motivated to write more.


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